Research Interests:

• Transdiagnostic mechanisms to improve psychopathological outcomes in minoritized populations
• Emotion-based personality trait and disorder development across the lifespan
• Adverse early life experiences
• Emotion and emotion regulation
• Aging
• Health psychology

Research:

During my undergraduate research career, my research was involved in developmental psychology; specifically, I studied the impact of culture and parental emotion socialization on children's emotion understanding and development. I also studied emotion regulation, personality, and sleep behaviors in undergraduate student populations. During my post-baccalaureate experience, my research shifted to a more clinical focus, and I worked with older and middle adult and child populations with diagnoses such as dementia, hormonally-impacted depression (specifically, perimenopausal depression), and autism.

My current research is centered on how trait responses to emotion (e.g., how one's consistent style of coping develops into a personality trait) can impact or be impacted by adverse childhood experiences. More specifically, I am interested in how one's early life experiences can impact one's later emotional and health development into adulthood. I am also interested in how trait responses to emotion may serve as transdiagnostic mechanisms for psychopathology and how to best identify them to improve psychopathological risk for minoritized populations.

I am a fifth year student in Dr. Suzanne Segerstrom's lab and avidly enjoying mentoring undergraduate students who are interested in psychology, research, and the graduate school process. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me with questions about the lab and/or my research!

Publications:

Tipsword, J. M., Southward, M. W., Adams, A. M., Brake, A., & Badour, C. L. (in press). Daily associations between experiences of trauma-related mental contamination and use of specific coping strategies: Results of a daily monitoring study. Journal of Interpersonal Violence.

Chentsova-Dutton Y., Leontyeva A., Halberstadt, A. G., & Adams, A. M. (2021). And they all lived unhappily ever after: Positive and negative emotions in American and Russian picture books. Emotion, 8, 1585-1598. doi: 10.1037/emo0001021.

Clasey, J. L., Adams, A. M., Geiger, P. J., Segerstrom, S. C., & Crofford, L. J. (2020). Estimation of cardiorespiratory fitness without exercise testing: Cross-validation in midlife and older women. Women's Health Reports, 1, 584-591.

Selected Presentations:

Adams, A. M., Meyr, K., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2023, February). Early life experiences and coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. Data blitz accepted for presentation at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Atlanta, GA.

Tipsword, J. M., Southward, M. W., Adams, A. M., Brake, C. A., & Badour, C. L. (2022, November). Daily associations between trauma-related mental contamination and use of specific coping strategies among women with a history of sexual trauma. Poster accepted for presentation at the 38th annual meeting of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, Atlanta, GA.

Adams, A. M., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2022, March). COVID-19 protective behaviors and conscientiousness in older adults. Poster presented at the American Psychosomatic Society, Long Beach, CA.

Adams, A., Smith, G. T., Widiger, T. A., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2021, February). Multidimensional structure and demographic correlates of trait responses to emotion. Poster presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology virtual conference.

Leontyeva, A., Chentsova-Dutton, Y., Halberstadt, A., & Adams, A. (2019, March). Are emotions costly in a harsh world? Poster presented at preconference session at the Society for Affective Science, Boston, MA.